Question: has an experiment ever gone wrong and if so what experiment was it and in what way did it go wrong?

Duncan McNicholl answered on 8 Nov 2017:

Mostly when experiments go wrong, it’s pretty boring stuff – they just don’t work instead of blowing up or melting or anything. If you mean just not working, that happens with my experiments all the time, and I have to keep making adjustments until I get good results. If you mean blowing up or melting, that doesn’t happen to me now, but it used to happen a bit when I was a chemistry teacher: my desk at my last school was covered in burns and weird purple stains, and the roof had some soot marks on it too.